Book Review: Funny Story | Emily Henry

With her signature blend of heartfelt emotions and a wonderful love story, I’m not alone in eagerly anticipating the newest Emily Henry novel each year! Funny Story is another genre-blending delight, centered around two people who couldn’t be more different, except for the one horrible thing they have in common…

What is Funny Story about?

Daphne used to love when her fiancé Peter would tell their story. The blustery day they met, the wind-blown hat, the decision to move to his quaint lakeside town and begin a life together. Daphne and Peter had the perfect love story, until the day that they didn’t.

Daphne is at home while Peter is out celebrating his bachelor party. She has gotten over the weirdness of him inviting a woman who was a childhood friend of his, Petra. Until Peter arrives home and tells her he is leaving her for Petra. They are moving in together, so Daphne needs to move out. In a show of “chivalry”, he even gives Daphne a week to move out while he and Petra are away on vacation together.

Daphne is reeling from the news and Peter’s abrupt departure when the doorbell rings. It seems Petra also broke off her relationship with her boyfriend Miles, and he’s at the door to see if she’s there. Daphne and Miles don’t know one another very well, but they find themselves in an unfortunately identical predicament. So Daphne decides to pop the question… can she move in to Miles’ spare room?

Miles and Daphne are complete opposites. Miles is scruffy, into sad love ballads, and works a nontraditional career at a winery with odd jobs to fill in the slow seasons. Daphne is buttoned up, obsessively organized, and works at a library. Miles is charismatic, instantly charming everyone he meets. Daphne is so bad at small talk and opening up that her coworkers suspect she may be in witness protection.

Both are heartbroken and going through their own grief, but they also form a friendship and support system for each other. When they receive invitations to Peter and Petra’s wedding, they are shocked and furious. Drowning their sorrows in a few too many drinks at the bar, they devise a plan to post strategically misleading photos of their summer together in hopes of making Peter and Petra jealous.

The line between putting on a show and developing real feelings become more blurred as the summer goes on. And when a few unexpected family members show up, they learn more about one another. Can heartbreak eventually bring them to heal and find true love?

What did I think of Funny Story?

The opening sequence of Funny Story is a jaw-dropper. Even though I knew that Peter was going to come home and beak off the engagement with Daphne, I was still shocked at the audacity to do it at all, let alone how he did it (leaving to go on vacation with Petra and asking her to move out). Daphne had moved to Michigan for Peter. One of her struggles is opening up to people and getting to know them. Now she’s living in a state with no friends, family, or home.

“You can’t force a person to show up, but you can learn a lesson when they don’t.”

I don’t think Emily Henry is capable of writing a subpar book. While this wasn’t my personal favorite Emily Henry book (I would give that honor to Happy Place), I loved it and thought Funny Story had several things in its favor that make it a top-tier rom-com. The first of those is that while Funny Story is heartfelt and emotional, it wasn’t as heavy as some of her other books (Henry loves to pull our heart strings on the way to getting her couples together). The second is that Miles is (in my opinion) her best male main character yet.

One of my favorite parts of the story was Daphne’s developing friendship with her coworker Ashley. Even more than Miles, Ashley played a large role in Daphne’s journey of self-acceptance and growth across the novel. Ashley is a single mother and works with Daphne at the library. She’s the first to directly confront Daphne with how closed off she is. When Daphne says it is because she isn’t interesting and people don’t want to get to know her, Ashley calls her on it. As their friendship develops, Ashley shows Daphne how she has allowed herself to become lost in relationships. And that didn’t only happen with Peter (who it’s clear is the wrong match for her), but Daphne begins to repeat the pattern with Miles. Ashley is the type of friend everyone needs—the one who is unafraid to call you out and does it from a place of caring about you. Daphne is nearly obsessively organized and rigid in how she lives her life. Ashley and Miles are part of her journey to realize that life isn’t lived through a task list or calendar.

“All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don’t get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers. Those are the moments that make a life. Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time, accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house.”

As I’ve come to love and expect with Emily Henry, she writes a fiction novel that happens to have a romance element and she blends together tropes and flips them on their head. In this book we see opposites attract and fake relationship. I normally don’t love fake relationship, but when Henry uses that trope, it’s with weight and gravitas. It delves deeply into their feelings rather than being fluffy and verging on ridiculous. Henry has said that she is proud to call herself a romance author, even though she knows her books straddle the line with fiction and often cross into it. As a teenager, Henry never read romance books because they had the reputation of being “trashy” books. Once she read one, she realized how much tension, character development, and growth they can offer their characters. Plus it can be hard to dislike a happily-ever-after ending!

Final Thoughts

Henry can do no wrong in my eyes, and this was another wonderful story with characters that you won’t be able to help loving. I did the audiobook of Funny Story narrated by Julia Whelan and it was fantastic. If you think Emily Henry can do no wrong, Julia Whelan falls into the at same exact camp. Her narration always captures emotion, relationships, character development, and dialogue expertly. She’s considered one of the best in the business for a reason! Miles is the most loveable leading man we’ve gotten from Henry yet. He’s an all-time character and is so pure of heart that the reader can’t help but fall for him right alongside Daphne. He’s a healer and an empath. While he has his own growth in the book, its much less than what we’ve seen in other books with MMCs. This is a book about Daphne’s growth and how Miles, Ashley, and a few other characters are her support to get to a place of happiness. Charming, poignant, and full of heart!

Thank you to Berkley Publishing and Penguin Random House for my copy. Opinions are my own.

If you liked Funny Story, what should you read next?

About the Author

Emily Henry is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Happy Place, Book Lovers, People We Meet on Vacation, and Beach Read, as well as the forthcoming funny story. she lives and writes in the American midwest.

Find her occasionally on instagram @emilyhenrywrites.

About the Book

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: Stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…right?